One number is not enough
The brief for the Commercial Value Tool was a calculator. But the complexity was never arithmetic. It was definition. What counts as savings? Cashable returns against a baseline? Forecasted value from future contracts? Carbon savings, social value, risk reduction?
Conflating these produces a number no one trusts. A buyer reporting 12% savings against budget is making a different claim than one reporting 12% against market rate. Strategic value does not appear in a cost comparison at all. Giving it its own section was the clearest structural decision in the project.
Three sections, three purposes
The tool guides buyers through three distinct types of value, each with its own completion status in the task list:
Contract Details. The factual record. Contract ID, supplier, dates, total value. Context for everything else.
Procurement Savings. Cashable savings against a defined baseline. The tool captures the baseline approach (budget, previous price, market rate, or median compliant bid) because that methodology determines what the percentage actually means.
Strategic Value. Cost avoidance, social value, risk reduction, sustainability outcomes. Benefits that do not appear in a savings figure but are real. Captured and surfaced separately from cashable savings.
Why they stay separate
The two types inform different decisions. Cashable savings go into financial reports and business cases. Strategic value supports policy narratives and sustainability reporting. Aggregating them would obscure both.
Making strategic value feel optional would have led to systematic under-reporting. Giving it its own section, with its own completion status, signals that it matters. The design refuses to collapse everything into a single figure. The result is data that buyers can defend and peers can compare meaningfully.